Bullies Sla-pped New Girl Cheerleader — Unaware Her Father Is A Hell Angels
Chapter 13
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But before he went inside, he stood in the driveway for a moment and looked at the sky. It was a clear night. The stars were out the way they get in the country, thick and close and without apology. He thought about his daughter sitting in a town she didn't know with a bracelet with a broken clasp, handling it. He breathed out slowly. She was handling it.But Ray Malone was the kind of father who understood something important about what it means to let your child stand on their own. He understood that you step back, you trust, you let them do it. And you make absolutely sure that if they need you, you are close enough to reach.He went inside. And in a room on the other side of town, at a desk in a home office, Sheriff Dale Greer sat reading a file he'd taken from a cabinet he hadn't opened in years. The file had Ray Malone's name on it. He read through it once. Then again. Then he picked up his pen. And he started to write a different kind of plan.One that had nothing to do with Ray Malone at all. One that had everything to do with his daughter.The weekend came and went the way weekends do when you're somewhere between one life and another.Cass drove home to Clarksville on Saturday morning. She sat at her father's kitchen table and ate the dinner he'd made: pot roast, cornbread, green beans from a can that he always apologized for and she always told him tasted fine, and they talked about nothing much. The weather. A bike he was rebuilding for a customer up in Nashville. Whether the community college library was likely to get better about its textbook situation.He fixed the bracelet while she was helping clear the dishes. He'd had the hardware ready. She hadn't asked him to. He just had it. He worked at the kitchen table with a small leather awl and a piece of new cord and a replacement clasp he'd ordered online sometime in the past 4 days without saying anything about it. She watched him work. His hands were large and rough and completely precise.When he handed it back, the clasp was solid, better than the original. She put it on her left wrist without a word. He looked at it once. Then he went back to clearing the table. That was the whole conversation about what had happened.She drove back to Harlow Creek on Sunday evening with a full stomach and a fixed bracelet and a quiet that sat differently in her chest than the quiet she'd arrived with.She didn't know that while she was gone, something had been set in motion.Monday morning, Wednesday, not yet Thursday. The week had a direction.